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Social structure, reasonable gain, and entrepreneurship in Africa.

entrepreneurship in Africa

During this course, five of the most interesting concepts to me were globalization, social structure, absolute advantage, self-managed team, and export trading company.

Globalization as defined by Wild (2016), is being “the trend toward greater economic, cultural, political, and technological interdependence among national institutions and economies” (p. 7). An example of cultural and food globalization is when chili peppers were brought from the Western Hemisphere by explorer Christopher Columbus to Europe where they eventually spread to Asia (National Geographic Society, 2012).

Social structure is defined by Wild (2016), as “a culture’s fundamental organization, including its groups and institutions, its systems of social positions and their relationships, and the process by which its resources are distributed” (p. 49). An example of this is instability in rural Africa households caused by uncontrollable environmental influences such as death, drought, and disease which all can quickly unbalance families and their spending on goods (George, Kotha, Parikh, Alnuaimi, & Bahaj, 2015).

Absolute advantage is defined by Wild (2016), as the “ability of a nation to produce a good more efficiently than any other nation” (p. 142). A good example of this would be how China has become known to possess absolute advantage in manufacturing above other nations due to their access of low labor cost (Fontinelle, 2018).

Self-managed teams are defined by Wild (2016), as a “team in which the employees from a single department take on the responsibility of their former supervisors” (p.290). An example of self-managing teams would be the employees at Morning Star, the largest tomato processor in the world (Colvin, 2012). At Morning Star, the majority of employees do not have a title and are authorized to make decisions without consulting a supervisor (Colvin, 2012).

Export trading companies (ETC) are defined by Wild (2016), as a “company that provides services to indirect exporters in addition to activities related directly to clients’ exporting activities” (p. 325). ETCs have not been very successful in the U.S. but have had much success in the Asia markets. An example of one in South Korea is Samsung and it makes up 28% of the Korean Stock Market (Premack, 2017).